is on the side of Virtue; and a prosperous remainder of life, with
a happy death, is promised to the hero. Of this providence Minerva,
with the approval of Jupiter, is the wise and indefatigable organ. But
while the general idea of providence moves in the right direction,
the polytheistic formations work powerfully in a wrong one. David and
his companions ate the show-bread in the temple, and were blameless,
because it was to relieve a hunger that they had no other means of
satisfying: but even impending famine does not excuse or palliate the
offence of the companions of Ulysses, who use for food a portion of
the oxen of the Sun. The jealousy and cruelty of Neptune, the gifts
of Mercury to Autolycus, the savage crimes of Polyphemus, which do
not detract from his relation to a deity of the highest rank, the
disparagement of the highest human virtues in Calypso, the hostility
to human peace and happiness in Circe and the Sirens, place the divine
life of the Odyssey on a much lower level than the human and heroic,
and to a certain extent depress by their admixture the sound ethical
tone of the poem. All along, while Homer luxuriates, poetically, in the
abundance and brilliancy of his materials, he has morally to repair
their deficiencies, and to contend with and overrule their bias.
I cannot therefore but differ greatly from Nitzsch, who, in his Essay
on the Anger of Neptune[760], seems to elevate it to the dignity of a
providential resentment, and to conceive of the sufferings of Ulysses
as a punishment for a moral offence in the treatment of Polyphemus.
In this way I grant that a sort of parallel is established between
his case and the chastisements which Achilles receives in the Iliad,
through the death of Patroclus, and the surrender of the body of
Hector. Both heroes seem thus to stand upon a level: both favoured
children of the gods, honoured in the main, but chastised for their
faults. But even this seeming parallelism fails when we remember the
respective sequels. The curtain of the Iliad falls on the eve of the
premature death of Achilles: as that of the Odyssey is dropping over
the head of Ulysses, we perceive, in perspective, the picture of his
serene old age.
[760] Nitzsch, Odyssee, Vol. III. p. xiv.
As regards the important question of purity, the impression made on
my own mind in reading the poems of Homer is this: that, but for his
mythology, they would have been unimpeachable, at least in one point of
virtue; they would have been absolutely pure. Whatever is dissolute in
their moral tendency as regards this particular subject, evidently and
directly flows from that source. We rarely meet a sentiment that can
arouse anything like revulsion: the worst by far that has struck me is
the advice given to Achilles by his mother Thetis (Il. xxiv. 130), as
a mode of solace for his grief. The narrative of the Net of Vulcan in
the Odyssey is one, that Homer would have been far too modest to recite
with reference to human beings: and the only other passage, which seems
to be marked with a tinge of grossness, is that which relates to the
stratagem of Juno in the Fourteenth Iliad.
~_Its bearing as to poetic effect._~
We may, however, justly distinguish between the influence of mythology
on the morality of the Poems, and its operation with regard to poetic
effect. In this view the consequences of its introduction, though
mixed, are upon the whole highly favourable. There is indeed more or
less of descent from the usual grandeur of Homer, when we find his
deities mingling in actual conflict: because they never sustain in
the field of battle a part at all corresponding to their celestial
dignity and presumed power. Nor is the Theomachy proper, in the
Twenty-first book of the Iliad, among the most successful parts of
the poem. But the principal portion of their agency takes effect upon
the elements or other material objects, or upon animals, or upon the
human mind by way of influence and suggestion: and its tendency is in
general to impart interest and variety, as well as poetic elevation,
to the scenery and narrative. The plot of each epic is worked out
simultaneously in two different forms upon two different arenas: in
Olympus by divine counsel, and on earth by human effort and execution.
Yet no confusion results from the double action, while the play and
counterplay of the divine and human elements communicate a remarkable
elasticity to the movement of the poems. Their value is particularly
felt in the Iliad, which, from its limited scene and subject, lies in
danger of the sameness which, by this means among others, it on the
whole escapes. In particular, the relation between the assisting or
patron deities, and the hero or protagonist of each poem, is conducted
with great consistency and effect: but the most sublime uses of
supernatural machinery to be found throughout the poems are those in
which the traces of it are the most shadowy and faintly drawn. Take
for example the manner in which Achilles is sent out unarmed to the
field, and again, to the manner of his arming, in the Iliad: in the
Odyssey, the wonderful picture of divine displeasure and incumbent
malediction seeming to gather around and hem in the Suitors of
Penelope, concurrently with the preparations for human vengeance: as if
the scene were too dark for eyes like theirs to catch the true meaning
of these lowering signals, which give a gloomy but majestic sanction to
the terrible swoop of retributive justice alighting upon crime.
~_Its earliest and latest forms._~
It would be most interesting to pursue the comparison between the
believing or credulous infancy of Paganism as we see it in Homer, and
its cold and jealous decrepitude as we find it in the writers of its
latest period, when the light of the lamp was fading before the already
risen Sun.
In Homer we find the gods offering in their conduct every sort of
example of weakness, passion, and fraud. But they take an active
share in the government of the world, and men look up to them,
collectively or individually, with more or less of confusion indeed,
both intellectual and moral, but still truly and actually as exercising
some sort of providential government over the world. The mythology of
the time of Homer is a weak, faulty, and corrupt religion, I admit, but
still it is a religion, a bond which associates man with the unseen
world, and brings some, at least, of its influences to bear upon his
conduct and character. And if the Greeks of Homer were not shocked by
those immoralities of the Immortals which afterwards came to be thought
intolerable, it was not because they were more impure than their
posterity, for they were far purer: but the principle of belief in the
invisible was in them alike lively and inconsequent; and it was not yet
even conscious of a load which, in later times, with enfeebled force,
and an augmented critical activity, it could not carry.
In the time of Plutarch, about one hundred years after our Lord’s
nativity, we find the change complete. There was now no principle of
belief in men’s minds which could endure either the good or the evil
of the ancient system: and a quickened intelligence, as well as the
streaming in of rays from Revelation, had made the human intellect
more painfully alive to its moral solecisms, without rendering it
able to suggest a remedy. Accordingly, Plutarch relieves the Homeric
deities from the faults imputed to them by saying, that the Poet has
made use of these fictions to excite the fancy[761]: ἐκεῖνα πέπλασται
πρὸς ἐκπλῆξιν ἀνθρώπων. Or, again, it was, he says[762], because
the name of Τύχη, Fortune or Chance, was not yet in use, that men
referred to the gods what they did not know how to account for in
any other manner. Alas for mankind! sad is the state of those, who
must reckon the invention of that name among their blessings. In the
fact, however, that Homer and his age knew nothing of the word or the
idea, he discloses to us one of the many points in which infancy is
practically wiser than old age. Let us, Plutarch goes on to say, cure
these errors by other passages of the Poet in which he gives us the
truth, the ὑγιαίνουσαι περὶ θεῶν δόξαι καὶ ἀληθεῖς: but the passages,
which he cites with this view, are not passages where the deities are
represented as in any active relations of good towards the world: they
are simply those which exhibit them as living in a repose undisturbed
by care, while they leave for us a destiny of trouble: they are those
which relate to the θεοὶ ῥεῖα ζώοντες, the αὐτοὶ δέ τ’ ἀκηδέες εἰσίν.
Stripped of active vice, but yet not adorned with virtue, they become
merely cold and selfish, hopeless and inaccessible abstractions.
[761] De Aud. Poet. 20.
[762] Ibid. 23.
There is in all this a certain logical sequence. The starting point is
that of belief in a moral Governor of the universe, good himself, and
enjoining goodness upon others. But his own goodness fails, and his
agency among men for the original purpose becomes more and more feeble
and equivocal, while the human intellect, sharpened by discussion,
and puffed up with knowledge, or with the supposition and phantasm
of it, becomes more and more exacting: so that the abstract gods in
Cicero are (without doubt) far more elevated than the personal gods of
Homer. But they are mere works of art: and, after all, the personal
gods of Homer were the only ones that had been really worshipped by
men: and when their case becomes so bad that they can no longer be
exhibited to the people as rulers of the world, a refuge is found in
the Epicurean theory, which relegates them to a heaven of enjoyment and
abundance, and on pretence of mental ease denies them any prerogative
of intervention in human affairs[763]. The gain of more careful and
comprehensive theory is much more than counterbalanced by the practical
loss of the personal element, and therefore of the belief in a real
Providence, overseeing the affairs of men. So the next onward step
is to the doctrine of the Academicians. In the _De Naturâ Deorum_,
where that sect is represented by Cotta in the discussion with the
champions of the Epicureans and the Stoics, Cicero himself, and the
ruling tendency, if not opinion, of his day, are evidently exhibited
to us under Cotta’s name. The transition now made is from gods with a
sinecure to no gods at all: and Paganism ends in nullity, just as a
moving mass finds its final equilibrium in repose.
[763] Lucret. i. 57-62.
~_Its gloomy view of human destiny._~
Even while heroic Greece and its great Poet existed, the deepest
problems of our being were far too dark for man to penetrate. The
picture which I have rudely drawn, and which is not wholly a joyless
picture, was liable to be blackened, even for this world, by many a
storm of crime and of calamity; at the very best it was a picture for
this world only, for the mortality and not the immortality of man. But
that scene has its close: and most touching it is to see that, with
all his creative power, with all his imaginative brightness, with all
the advantage he derived from living in the youth of the world, before
mankind had fully sounded the depth of their own fall, or had begun to
accumulate the sad records of their miseries and crimes; even Homer
could not solve the enigma of our condition, or disperse the clouds
that gathered round our destiny. There are two profoundly memorable
passages in the poems, which have set their double seal on this truth.
One of them is in the Odyssey: it is a confession from the mouth
of that Achilles, in whose mind and person, as they are delineated
by Homer, our humanity has been carried perhaps to a higher point
of grandeur, than it has ever since attained. ‘Do not, illustrious
Ulysses, do not palter with me about death,’ says the mournful shade.
‘Rather would I serve for hire under a master, aye and a needy master,
upon the face of earth, than be lord of the whole world of the
departed[764]:’
[764] Od. xi. 488.
μὴ δή μοι θάνατόν γε παραύδα, φαίδιμ’ Ὀδυσσεῦ·
βουλοίμην κ’ ἐπάρουρος ἐὼν θητευέμεν ἄλλῳ
ἀνδρὶ παρ’ ἀκλήρῳ, ᾧ μὴ βίοτος πολὺς εἴη,
ἢ πᾶσιν νεκύεσσι καταφθιμένοισιν ἀνάσσειν.
A trail of heavenly light indeed so far played upon the heroic world,
that we hear of those few who had already been translated to the skies;
and of two more, one a son of Jupiter, already in the peaceful Elysian
plains, and the other Menelaus, who, as his daughter’s husband, was
likewise to be carried thither on his decease. But it is the mouth of
Achilles, the illustrious, the godlike Achilles, which here utters, in
tones so deeply mournful, the common voice of the children of Adam.
It was the very same conclusion which, as we find in another
place[765], this favoured mortal had formed on earth.
[765] Il. xxiv. 525.
The second passage is one spoken by Jupiter himself. As the commonest
epithets used by Homer for βροτοὶ, mortals, are δειλοὶ and οἰζυροὶ, so
the highest god lays down the law of their condition, describing it as
that than which there is nothing more wretched among all that live and
move upon the earth[766]:
[766] Il. xvii. 446. Compare Od. xvii. 129, where ἀκιδνότερον is
substituted.
οὐ μὲν γάρ τί πού ἐστιν ὀϊζυρώτερον ἀνδρὸς
πάντων, ὅσσα τε γαῖαν ἔπι πνείει τε καὶ ἕρπει.
Such as we have seen, and so glorious, was the wisdom, and the valour,
and the beauty, and the power, that dwelt in man; but only that through
life he might, upon the whole, be paramount in woe above all meaner
creatures, and then that he might die in a gloom unrelieved by hope.
None have illustrated this piercing truth by contrasts so sharp as
Homer, between the chill and dismal tone of the general destiny of man
on the one hand, and on the other, the joy and cheerfulness which the
effort of an elastic spirit can for a time create. But the woe which he
could only exhibit, it was reserved for One greater than he, yet only
by sorrow and suffering, to remove.
~_The personal belief of Homer._~
I have forborne in this Essay from entering at large into the often
agitated question, whether Homer believed in the deities of whom he
speaks so largely. He may express his own childlike creed; and such
a creed by no means requires for its support in the individual mind,
that it should have been visibly represented by facts within its own
experience. Or he may use as the material of poetry that which, without
approving itself to his own heart, was, nevertheless, to his hearers
in general, a real and substantial system of religion. Nay, he might
even be dealing with what had ceased to be believed in his day, but
had still a retrospective life, because it had been the hearty, and
was still the conventional, worship of the people. The truth may lie
in, or it may lie between, any of these suppositions. The one thing
of which I feel most assured is, that he was not, as to his religion,
a mere allegorist when speaking of his Jupiter and Minerva, any more
than he was a mere hypocrite, when he ascribed occurrences in human
life to Providence under the name of ‘the deity,’ or ‘the deities.’ He
represents what either was or had been, for his people, a belief in the
unseen under particular forms, and what still in some way represented
a reality for them and for himself. It is this belief of which I have
spoken throughout, and which, under any of the suppositions I have
made, seems to me to warrant all the stress I have laid upon it.
To attempt a formal solution of the question, whether he believed or
not in the dress of his religion, as well as in the religion itself,
would, I fear, be frivolous. It is a case in some degree parallel to
the disputes whether Shakspeare adhered, in the controversies of the
sixteenth century, to the side of the Romish or the Reformed. Neither
Shakspeare nor Homer ought to be judged as if they had been theologians
_ex professo_. Both followed the law of their sublime art, and
represented in forms of beauty and delight, or of majesty and gloom, as
the case required, such materials as they found ready to hand. Critical
analysis, nice equipoises, strict definitions, were for neither the
one nor the other. But in the works of neither do the cold tones of
scepticism find an echo: and probably the mental frame of both with
reference to the substance of their religion may have been not very
different from that of the poor, the maidens, and the children of their
day.
SECT. VII.
_On the traces of an origin abroad for the Olympian Religion._
Let me now attempt to divide the principal deities of Homer with
reference to their origin, or to the channel of their introduction into
Greece; premising, however, that all such classification of them is
admitted to be founded upon evidence, at best presumptive, and often
also slight.
The classes will be as follows:
1. Of those who were worshipped by the Hellenic and Pelasgian races,
and probably by all others known in the inner Homeric world.
These were,
1. Jupiter.
2. Minerva.
3. Apollo.
4. Latona.
5. Diana.
6. Neptune.
The three first of these may be considered as deities of immemorial and
universal worship. Neptune was far more Hellenic than Pelasgian: and
indeed his place in the list is doubtful.
2. Of immemorial Hellenic worship.
1. Juno.
2. Persephone.
3. Pluto or Aidoneus.
3. Of established Pelasgian worship.
1. Demeter or Ceres.
2. Venus, more recent than the former.
4. Of worship introduced to the Greek races within the memory of man.
_a._ Brought in from Phœnicia, or through the channel of the Phœnicians.
1. Hermes, or Mercury.
2. Hephæstus, or Vulcan.
3. Dionysus, or Bacchus.
_b._ From Thrace.
Mars.
_c._ Paieon has no note of country, except in so far as he may be
connected with Egypt by the declaration that the Egyptians were of his
race.
Ἠέλιος, the Sun, appears to be placed in connection, by the various
notes he bears, both with Egypt and with the Persian name.
All these deities were, with some others, more or less naturalized
among the Greeks within Homer’s lifetime. Themis was probably a pure
Hellenic creation, as Vesta seems to have been Pelasgian: the latter
exhibiting the genius of domestic order, the former, its fuller
development in political society. But Vesta is, though an Homeric idea,
not an Homeric goddess.
Now while Homer fails, or more probably avoids, to give us any direct
information about the derivation of the Greek races or deities, he
notwithstanding establishes by partial and incidental notices many
traces of exterior affinity, not always the less secure and trustworthy
because they are negative.
While going through the divinities in detail, I have remarked upon such
traits of their character, history, or worship, as appeared to connect
them with any particular origin; but the question remains, can we find,
through however rude a resemblance, any general model abroad for the
Olympian system, or, in the absence of such a model, any presumptive
evidence from Homer, which may serve to connect it with any national or
local root or roots in particular?
~_The Olympian Gods and the Ethiopians._~
It is well worthy of remark, that he has associated the body of the
Greek deities, as a body, with one, and one only, point, exterior to
the Greek nation. That point is the country of the Ethiopians.
Homer has shown a peculiar interest in these Ethiopians. They are
ἀμύμονες: an epithet which he appears to connect especially with purity
of blood. In the First Iliad, the whole body of the gods are absent
from Olympus for eleven days, to enjoy the sacrifices offered by that
people. In the Twenty-second Iliad, the statement is less express as
to time; but again they are apparently enjoying themselves in the same
quarter, during the funeral rites of Patroclus, and Iris is in haste
to go thither, that she may not lose her share. In the First Odyssey,
Neptune is among the same people for the same purpose, while the other
deities are in Olympus. In the Fifth Odyssey, he is coming from among
them, when he espies Ulysses on his raft. The time intervening is so
considerable, that we must presume the two last-mentioned passages to
refer to two separate visits.
The following points may be considered as established:
1. The Ethiopians, visited as above, must be supposed by Homer in the
main to worship the same body of deities as the Greeks.
2. The Ethiopians extend from the rising to the setting sun; but those
Ethiopians of whom Homer speaks particularly, are in connection with
sacrifices in the East; for the Solyman mountains[767], as conceived by
him, probably border upon Lycia, and they are on Neptune’s route[768],
from the Ethiopian country back to the sea, which, as I hope to show
elsewhere, runs along the double line of the Mediterranean and the
Euxine.
[767] Il. vi. 184.
[768] Od. v. 282.
3. They are further fixed in a southern country by their name, which
indicates darkness or swarthiness of countenance, and by the visit of
Menelaus to them in the course of his adventures, which lay exclusively
to the southward.
4. They are evidently distinguished by great liberality or high favour
in the sacrificial service of the gods.
5. They are defined to be by the Ocean, and thus in the farthest
situation to the South-east that was conceived of by Homer and the
Greeks.
6. At the same time, although they are the farthest men in that
direction[769], they are nowhere described as lying at a very great
absolute distance. They are simply τηλόθ’ ἐόντες.
[769] Od. i. 23.
Now it is not only possible, but on every ground likely, that in his
conception of the South-eastern Ethiopians, Homer mixed up together
various traditions, belonging to different places and nations. Even as,
in his conception of the Mouth of Ocean, which is with him always one
single mouth, he seems to have blended and amalgamated geographical
reports founded upon more than one original, or prototype, in nature.
The Solyman name has suggested to some critics a connection with the
Salem of the Hebrews. But the name is much more likely to be derived
from the Soliman Koh, a ridge of mountains running to the south-west
from Caubul, and sometimes defined as extending into Persia. The
liberality in sacrifice ill accords with the early Persian religion,
but finds a probable original in that of the Medes with their order
of Magians. But upon the whole, it would seem that Homer must have
had a reason for the peculiar prominence he has given to these
South-eastern Ethiopians, in connection with the gods of Olympus; for
the association, unless suggested by a reason, is neither natural, nor
in the manner of the Poet. Could it have been any other than this,
that he regarded their country, however indeterminate its place in his
imagination, as the original seat of the religion of his own, and that
he therefore referred it thither bodily without notice of details?
Now this would mean as the original seat, also, of the ancestors of
the Hellenic tribes. We are not, in the event of accepting such a
supposition, to imagine that he intended to make the assertion that the
Olympian system had been derived from Persia and Media as it stood,
but only to imply that there, according to national tradition, lay its
root. The Trojans, it will be remembered, have their not Olympian but
Idæan Jove: and the Ethiopians are the only foreign race, with whom he
associates Olympus and its band of Immortals.
I have already stated elsewhere grounds for supposing that the Achæans,
as they were immediately an Hellenic, were also primarily, as well as
the other Hellenes, a Persian race. We have seen the existence of the
Persian name in Greece, and its connection, according to Homer, with
what Homer thought the remotest East, by the shore of Ocean. We have
also seen its connection with the Sun, the prime deity of the Persians.
This visible head of creation, standing next to the Supreme Being, we
find that the Greeks speedily identify with their Apollo, who is so
prominent as the son of Jupiter, in dignity, in obedience, and in his
father’s favour, as to stand in a class entirely distinct from that of
his other sons.
On the one hand, we seem to find here matter confirmatory of the
Persian origin of the Hellenic tribes; and on the other, a general
indication of the derivation of the earliest Greek religion from a
certain part of the East. But still we must beware of any over-broad
inference. The religion, it is likely, grew largely as it travelled,
and was developed freely after it had reached its home in the Greek
peninsula. And it would be contrary to all reason to suppose that
Homer was in a condition to refer back to each of the Eastern races
their proper contribution towards the aggregate, though we may justly
suppose him able to draw some kind of line between the system as it
was flourishing in Greece, with all its additions, elaborations and
refinements, and the crude undigested materials as they had been
imported from abroad; perhaps we might say, between the system as he
found it, and the same system as he left it.